Nuke

the vorlons were known for doing all kinds of manipulations to almost every race in b5. genetic manipulation, social manipulation, religious engineering, etc, for millennia. they are why most races have telepaths for example, and i wouldn't doubt they are responsible for sweedish meatballs as well (which is why i call them vorlon meatballs). you saw some religious engineering when kosh got into g'kar's head and by the end of the series he has reached messiah status, even going as far as making themselves look like deities to everyone except londo. im curious if the vorlons and shadows agreeing to leave wasn't part of their plan all along. the whole thing could have been a test to see if the various races were ready to leave the cradle as it were. perhaps failing to pass the test the first time around. rather than each race choosing one side or the other, choosing their own way instead. if they were really at war they would have destroyed eachother long ago younger races be damned. instead i see them in a shepherding role, their conflict is not about them. i think they could have made it work even losing some main characters, or they would have done their thing, instilling order, knocking over some anthills and went quiet for another few thousand years. they are clearly playing the long game here and can tolerate huge setbacks.

they are from a park near a small beach not far from the end of the airport runway (not really a great place for plane watching as we only get a few a day, a couple alaska airlines flights a cargo plane and maybe a medivac if you are lucky, you are better off at the floatplane dock for that). judging by the number of grubs we found they were not using any pesticides at all. up here in se alaska we get a large number of berry species. most neumerous are blueberries and salmon berries (sort of like a raspberry and come in several different colors, we also havew watermellon berries, elderberries, strawberries (usually the deer eat them before they ripen) , and a few others, but not as numerous). by everywhere i mean everywhere, lots of kids like to chew up the salmon berries and spit them out along the roads and trails so that more berry bushes show up next year, even had one pop up under our deck once. they usually dont have bugs though, or none that ive found.

i find the biggest source of weevils was a case of kraft macaroni and cheese that sat in our pantry for a year or two. the tell tale sign is little tinny holes in the cheese packet. im not sure whether they come with the cheese or the noodles. but ive found them in flour, bisquick, sugar (that was the fastest weevil ive ever seen, and this may have been cross contamination since i only found one), buttermilk powder (produced some of the largest and most numerous), and various pastas, but i have never seen one in rice. with non-tube pasta you can usually just ignore them and they float to the top and can be skimmed off with ease. with things like flour any live weevils get ground up in the milling, but the eggs can survive, the use by date usually correlates to when they hatch. to store it long term you need freeze it and transfer it to a clean sealable container after a few days, never put new flour on top of old flour. many drystuffs come in paper packaging, which wont stop cross contamination so be sure it gets stored asap. because of the pandemic we have received so much extra money that our pantry is overflowing, and a lot of it is going to get contaminated before we can use it. so i have been rotating it through what little freezer space we have. also when living in a humid environment, freezing sugar seems to cause it to clump up into solid blocks that need breaking up. you can tape a couple silica gel packets to the inside of the lid to keep it from re-clumping. we usually arent so concerned about sugar though as we rotate through it pretty quickly.

think of it this way, they are blueberry flavored grubs. im more grossed out by the hotdog episode of how its made.

one day we had my sister and her family over. everyone had the munchies but there was no snackfood in the house. so we went blueberry picking. wild blueberries always have grubs as insects like to lay their eggs in the blossoms that become berries. to get them out you need to soak them in brine overnight. we used seawater, as the berry bushes were near the beach. the larvae lose their oxygen supply and quickly burrow their way out of the berry, almost immediately they start floating to the surface. im not certain the role the salt plays, as i just picked this up from the folk wisdom of other berry pickers. its not 100% foolproof as a dead grub cannot extricate itself from the berry. if they drown or died prior to processing they stay put and some species of larva can live without oxygen for long periods of time and try to wait it out. i think farmed blueberries have the same problem as you can find grub boreholes on store bought berries. everyone wanted me to make some blueberry muffins, so after only four hours in the brine we skimmed the grubs and rinsed the berries and used some of them in the muffins. i made like 2 dozen or so muffins. some of them came out a little dry and my sister decided she would make a blueberry frosting. upon applying the blender to some berries and dumping them into a mixing bowl, we saw grubs everywhere. by that time everyone had eaten at least one muffin, i ate 2. thing is by the end of the day there were no muffins left, i even went back for a couple more myself. they tasted like any other blueberry muffin. this tends to make one wonder whether thats because all the other muffins have grubs too, and that a grubless muffin might actually not be as good. we also had a problem with pantry weevils. they seem to hate bay leaves and that has done a lot to suppress them. the weevils seemed to be coming from the food itself, as there were no pantry beetles as you would find if you had an infestation. factories might be able to sift out the weevils they have, but the eggs remain, and if you let things like noodles and flour sit in your pantry for too long, the eggs hatch and soon they are everywhere. so its all a matter of avoiding cross contamination between foodstuffs, we moved everything to tins. we also put drystuffs in the freezer for a couple days before putting them in their designated containers, with the hopes of killing the eggs. keeps them more or less at bay. this is another case where the gross out factor far exceeds their impact on human health and the flavor of food. its ok though as the fda has strict regulations regarding the insect content (as well as rodent droppings, this is why housecats are a thing) of your foods. keep in mind these thresholds of acceptability are non-zero.

you need the pee to make the oxidizer.

like all power structures, they seldom evaporate when they have served their purpose.

its very hard to find any realism with regards to space in most works of fiction. cartoon space craft are designed to dumb down the person watching the show so that later on in life they wont call out more adult scifi for committing the same atrocities against realism.

lol, nope. people are here more so more opportunity for them to make messes increases.

don't waste your work ethic at work. they usually don't deserve it.

the good news is you are in a space suit, the bad news is you have to go inside with it on. cant leave it at the door as a farmer would do with his boots.

plasma as a warhead might be a thing. i recall there being a mention of plasma torpedoes in the expanse books, better than conventional but not quite nuclear.

ive never worked a job where i didn't feel like i was exploiting people.

this happened a couple days ago. but after doing a bunch of house work so this place doesn't look like a crazy cat lady lives here, i opted to take a shower. i had made my usual rounds on the internet and left my computer on. when i came back i find one of my cats sleeping on my keyboard and a bunch of instances of kerbal space program running, most were spewing out errors. it took two restarts to get my computer back to functional. no doubt it did some damage to my ssds, as memory started running out (granted they might be getting upgraded soon, as the state of alaska decided to give us our pfds early this year due to covid).

there was project marauder that was supposed to create a ring of self confining plasma. such a weapon would have a strong emp effect. essentially its a ppc ala battletech, even the name references a common battlemech which carries such weaponry. supposidly its results were so good that it was quickly classified by the us government. that was back in the 80s-90s so who knows how far they have come since then. i think the expanse hits the nail on the head with its pdcs, railguns, and missiles.

more because its something thats easy to do when you are surrounded by vacuum. freeze drying is essentially putting things in a vacuum chamber, which causes the moisture to evaporate while keeping the solids. its probably more involved than that, but that's the jist of it. once its dry it can be compacted to remove the voids formerly occupied by moisture. space toilets already do these things, but the excrement is usually bagged and placed into storage for disposal on earth. instead make the compactor compact the crap into the right shape needed for a solid/hybrid engine. the "brick" can be loaded into the combustion chamber of an engine. so you need a hybrid engine design that has the ability to be reloaded during a space walk or perhaps from inside the station itself. buffalo chips.

i remember meat rocket. but not poo rocket.

recently a post on hack a day about space toilets got me thinking. crap is actually rather flammable, even more so when vacuum desiccated and compressed. when formed into a hollow cylinder and combined with an oxidizer feed you have a hybrid rocket engine. further more its a way to dispose of a waste product that would need to be returned to earth at some point anyway. you could potentially use such crappy engines to re-boost the station and solve two problems at once. makes me wonder what kind of isp you could expect.

antique furniture is often better than modern in terms of durability. they didn't conduct stress analysis to try and figure out how little material they could get away with using, and just overbuilt everything. just sand and reseal it, cheaper than buying a new one. as for the dishes, keep em till they break. people i live with keep buying fancy china and and really fancy silverwear that somehow weighs 5x your typical stuff. always make me nervous when i do dishes. fortunately they haven't replaced my mason jars yet, drop em and they bounce, drop the fancy glass and it shatters. never mind that pairing fancy dishes and silverware with prego jars is tacky af.

i was mostly thinking military applications where larger than usual safety margins are acceptable. say you have a space station which has been taken over by another government, and you need to send in a special ops team. granted were not quite where we need to do things like this yet. maybe they want to do a cover up and a properly lined up re-entry puts you in a position to be shot down by that country, so re-enter with different phasing, refuel, and rtb. you probably have to come up with a tom clancy esque situation where this capability is useful. crew is specifically the thing you need sstos for. especially if you want space travel to eventually be affordable to the masses. the skylon's approach to crew launch is a hab module in its cargo bay and the entire crew module could be jettisoned in an emergency and landed with chutes. biggest risk is engine failure at take off (and i have serious concerns about engine placement on skylon). a failure of one of the precoolers can be countered by switching to rockets giving you the option of a fuel dump and turn around. non-explosive failure of other parts of the engine might also be sufficient for a come around on the other engine (provided its placement is made more sane). explosive failure of an engine would probably trigger jettisoning the crew module. i think it could be made even safer than rockets with sufficient refinements.

i wouldn't doubt that its been done in ksp, though i haven't done it personally. this kind of thing seems like it would only really make sense for military applications, us space force would love to have this capability.

that might be another reason to have your thrust vector 7.5 degrees off axis and the widely spaced engines. but yea skylon is a paper airplane designed to sell engines. however i still see an ssto as a light surface to leo craft, with multistage semi-reusable heavy rockets doing the heavy lifting. the advantages of being able to routinely operate with fast turn around. if combined with midair refueling, then you can pick your position for your orbital insertion manuver and are no longer constrained as much by launch windows. i wonder what the feasibility of refueling a space craft post re-entry to fly it back to its home space port under power.

ive read that the sabre engine will be about the size of a bus.

more of a cat person myself. but my family down in az had a chihuahua that wasn't too bad. i think they mostly bark at people they don't know because this one was calm and quiet most the time. but i couldn't see myself having a pet that isn't constant plotting revenge on some minor past grievance.

i wouldn't mind if they stole the tv, then i could actually read more books. hell so long as they leave my main rig alone, dont take the 3d printer or any of my myriad of boxes of junk and random salvage parts, or anything from the fridge, id be cool with it.